


Unparalleled

by orphan_account



Category: Naruto
Genre: Action & Romance, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 14:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7895977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The arc of shinobi history tends toward miracles.</p><p>Prompt 18/Art Prompt: Hawk and Wolf by pentapus</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unparalleled

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are much loved/motivate me to stop bookmarking recipes and actually write something :3

 

Iruka had been a hostage in the Land of Lightning for one month, give or take a fortnight, when Kakashi appeared.

“Uh,” Iruka said, letting his head thunk back against the wall of the interrogation room, and began slowly counting down from ten while waiting for his sanity to come back from wherever it had fucked off to.

“What the hell?” yelled one of guards.

Kakashi’s visible eye widened and he glanced around the room - panicking, Iruka realized and appreciated on an abstract, hysterical level.

“This isn’t real,” he muttered. “I’m hallucinating.”

The hallucination cocked its head to one side and studied Iruka, apparently unconcerned by the missing nin running down the hallway to their cell, kunai drawn and chakra crackling and oh, gods, was this really happening?  Iruka struggled against his chakra-draining cuffs before an all-too-real hand closed over his shoulder.

“Maa, sensei,” the hallucination said, “those look a lot less comfortable than the ones Anko got us for our anniversary.”

And then it  _ smiled,  _ playful and fond and so surprising that it hurt like a punch of vertigo, Iruka reeling backwards from the touch as he choked out, “ _ What- _ ”

That was when four Mist nin slammed into the cell, steel blades glinting and radiating killing intent.

Kakashi stepped neatly in front of Iruka. “Please tell me these aren’t more of your crazy exes,” he said, voice light.

Heart slamming against his ribcage, Iruka managed, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

One of the ninja lunged forward.

“Yeah,” Kakashi sighed, dodging easily and putting a kunai in her back. “I kind of got that impression.”

\+ + +

They stopped by a creek near the edge of the forest, setting up makeshift camp as sunset colored the sky in warm hues.

“You know,” Kakashi huffed, out of breath from more or less punching their way out of the underground compound that Iruka’s would-be captors had been keeping him in. There were twigs in Kakashi’s hair from winding through the canopy, a smear of blood on his left cheekbone from when he’d swiftly eliminated the lone nin dispatched to chase after them. Iruka had been the one who bartered them into supplies and food at the last village though, so there was that at least. “You can ask.”

Iruka thought about it as he picked at his ration bar wrapper. “Who are you?” he finally asked.

Kakashi - Kakashi? - was wearing standard mission blacks, sleeves rolled up to the elbows as he spread his bedroll across the grass, and a different vest, all stiff black collar and sleek lines. He looked older, grey hair streaked with silver, like a watery echo of the last time Iruka had seen him at the new jounin ceremony, a pale figure beside Sakumo-sama’s billowing white robes. There were laugh lines at the corner of his eyes.

He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, blushing a little, and that was how Iruka knew, face aside, this really wasn’t Kakashi. Wherever the real one was, he wasn’t sitting in front of Iruka like this, loose and unguarded.

“I’m - him, but not exactly from these parts.”

There were scars on his knuckles that looked new. And he’d kept the mask over his left eye the whole time, even when they were fighting their way out of the compound. Iruka didn’t understand why he did it, just reached out and touched the spot on the mask, felt the slight quiver of an eyelid underneath. A beat passed. Then a warm grip slid around Iruka’s wrist and pulled it gently away.

“There’s this forbidden jutsu,” the man said in a voice that was achingly familiar and not at the same time. He gave Iruka a lopsided grin, but it looked scared, too hopeful. “I may need some help undoing it.”

\+ + +

Iruka met Kakashi on his first A-class mission as a chuunin. They and Mitarashi Anko were supposed to escort one of the daimyo’s daughters to her fiance; after watching the guy incapacitate a would-be assassin with a stick of dango, Iruka suspected that Kakashi had been added to their three-man team mainly to escort Iruka.

He would’ve sulked about it too - like Mizuki didn’t complain enough that Iruka always got special treatment as the Sandaime’s adopted son - except Kakashi turned out to be surprisingly funny as well, weird and interesting and terribly handsome. They’d gotten dangerously tipsy off sweet rice wine at the bride’s engagement ceremony and Iruka stole Kakashi’s hitae-ite to wear as a belt.

“Need that back,” Kakashi had complained, pushing a shock of white hair out of his eyes and glaring blurrily, but there was no bite behind it.

“So come and take it,” Iruka teased. 

Kakashi kissed him instead, warm and a little sloppy, and Iruka had felt happiness fizz from tip to toe. When he’d pulled away, Kakashi looked suspiciously glassy-eyed and a little bowled over, which made Iruka remember that by now he knew this was definitely  _ Hatake  _ Kakashi, the Godaime’s son and the late Yondaime’s protege, and promptly flushed redder than he had the time Mizuki tried to slip him some tongue in the alley behind Ichiraku. 

He didn’t realize he’d said that last part out loud until Kakashi narrowed his eyes. “Who else have you been kissing?”

“Oh come on,” Iruka groaned. He wanted the chapped press of Kakashi’s lips at the corner of his mouth again, or maybe trailing up the column of his throat. It was hard to decide. “It’s not important.”

Kakashi resulting sulk had been one for the ages, but after they’d rescued Anko from a particularly persistent young courtier and watched her proceed to get riotously drunk on hot sake, Kakashi had leaned in close, slotting their fingers together discreetly, and murmured, thoughtful and a little shy, “It’s important to me.”

\+ + +

Theory was never Iruka’s strong suit at the Academy. He preferred the practicals, the satisfaction of casting a successful henge or the weight of a kunai in his palm. “You’re lucky it won’t matter for you anyway,” Mizuki used to murmur whenever Fujisawa-sensei posted their test score rankings on the Academy’s bulletin board. “Like they’d hold back anyone with the Sarutobi name”

Hound - “Just call me that instead,” the man had said, grinning - rambled on about stored reverse-summoning jutsu and the half-life of chakra seals for ten minutes before Iruka held up a hand and said, “So, you went around sticking your nose where it didn’t belong.”

“That’s such a strong way to put it,” Hound sighed.

“Do you have any idea how to reverse the - the thing?”

Hound wrinkled his nose and shrugged. “It depends.”

“You seem very calm for someone who’s supposedly from another world.”

Hound looked up sharply. “And you must be very trusting.”

Iruka willed himself to blink normally and not look away. “It’s not as if I have a choice,” he pointed out. His chakra felt like a nervous cat, flaring up and then skittering away, leaving nothing but a thin thread that Iruka couldn’t even use to tree-walk. He rubbed the bruises from his cuffs absentmindedly and noted that Hound’s eye narrowed. “Besides, if you’re an imposter, you’re not a very good one. Kakashi-san isn’t that old.”

Hound raised an eyebrow. “And what is he like - your Kakashi?”

Iruka snorted. “He’s one of Konoha’s greatest shinobi. Brave and strong and loyal.”

“Ah, he sounds terrible.”

This was weird, Iruka decided. But this was also Hound, who wore Kakashi’s face open and interested; who was leaning close with a secret smile, and Iruka would be shamelessly lying if he said that he didn’t want to know - to forget his careful list of reasons why he shouldn’t let him brush Iruka’s hair out of the way, rub a calloused thumb over the scar bisecting his face. 

“In my world,” Hound murmured, “you once made a tokubetsu jounin cry because he was half a day late handing in his mission report.”

\+ + +

Kakashi introduced Iruka to the Godaime a year after they’d non-officially begun dating. 

“It’s not like I need his - it won’t change. What you mean to me,” Kakashi had explained, shoulders stiff as a steel spring and so rarely anxious that Iruka didn’t know what to do besides grin twice as wide, reach out to smooth the creases in Kakashi’s vest. He’d said, “Sure” and “Relax” and “How hard do you think he’ll punch me?” because the alternative was remembering that he wasn’t a kunoichi from a respected clan, or how sometime in the last few months, they’d begun sharing a clothing drawer - hair ties mixed in with Kakashi’s masks and the semi-secret copy of  _ Icha Icha  _ Iruka had gotten him as a gag birthday gift, mostly to see Kakashi turn tomato-red and blurt an excuse about tracking missing nin before disappearing in a panicked whirl of teleportation jutsu. 

“I’m not angry, Iruka-kun,” Sakumo-sama had said. He didn’t  _ look  _ angry, or surprised, or like he was going to announce that Kakashi needed to marry immediately and produce a fleet of Hatake heirs. “However” - and here a terrifying smile flashed out from underneath the Godaime’s ceremonial headdress - “as a father, I suppose I should ask about your - intentions toward my son.”

“That went better than I expected,” Kakashi mused once they escaped past earshot of the Hokage’s office.

Iruka glared. “Speak for yourself.” He was still waiting for his balls to crawl back out from wherever they had vanished to.

He and Kakashi came out even though in the end, though, because the next day Kakashi stumbled out of Sandaime’s study looking terrified and disheveled and a little smacked. Iruka couldn’t help it - he smirked.

“Nice shiner.”

Kakashi straightened his mask with great dignity. “Thank you,” he said. 

They strolled out of the Sarutobi compound side by side, listening to Konohamaru wail bloody murder from his crib and bumping hands together. Winter had bullied its way into the village after a long autumn, sticking cold fingers down the collar of Iruka’s jacket, and it made him huddle shamelessly close to Kakashi as they rounded the corner.

“What did you two talk about?” he asked, mostly to get Kakashi to look down at him, sunset gilding the edges of his unruly hair orange. 

“Ah.” A pause. “Sandaime-sama suggested that I undergo evaluation by T&I to determine any threats to your honor -”

“Did he,” Iruka said. 

“- and to let him know when the wedding is. And that he’d be there, front row.”

“Oh.” 

“He also threw a potted plant at me.”

“He’s not serious. Well, most of the time.”

“Actually, it’s kind of flattering.”

“Right,” Iruka agreed. “Wait. What?”

Kakashi looked straight ahead, expression aggressively neutral. “I just meant - it’s good that you have someone who cares. Enough to threaten me if I don’t make you happy.”

Iruka maintained privately that there was no explanation for this, the way Kakashi’s words could sometimes bypass air and skin and bone and burrow straight into all the secret crevices of Iruka’s heart. Promises were a flimsy, unwise thing to make in a shinobi village, but he thought that maybe this was all right - and besides, they had the approval of two legendary Hokages - so Iruka pressed an embarrassed kiss to Kakashi’s shoulder and laughed, “You always have.”

\+ + +

“I would like to propose a deal,” Hound said as they were packing up camp the next day. 

Iruka set down an empty box of rice crackers. “What do you mean?” he asked. It made Hound frown and narrow his eye, which Iruka guessed meant that in all universes, he was not destined for subterfuge.

“You and I both need to get back to Konoha,” Hound said. “But you won’t make it there on your own.”

“Oh really?”

“Your chakra pathways have substantial damage, you need-” Hound sighed. “Well, maybe you could, but it’d be a lot faster we helped each other.”

Iruka opened his mouth to argue, but it wasn’t like Hound didn’t have a point - for all he slouched and shrugged and yawned behind the mask, Hound looked like ANBU, moved like ANBU, and Iruka had spent too many months resenting the animal-masked shinobi to think that this man was anything less than so powerful it would make Mizuki explode from jealousy. 

“You could try to use me as a hostage to infiltrate the village,” he mused. “Or sell me off to another missing nin group before we get to Konoha.”

Hound pouted - it looked ridiculous on a man his age, but suspiciously well-practiced. “Maa, Iruka-sensei, I could never do such a thing.”

“Could you?”

“Never.”

Iruka turned away. “The informant I was supposed to meet up with for this mission did.”

They’d known exactly who he was and what he was there for; the fight had been boringly by-the-book - almost resigned. Iruka took a jutsu to the chest and woke up three days later, head swimming from chakra exhaustion and trying to grasp onto the tilting, rolling vowels of Lightning dialect. 

“You know, I didn’t kill all those nin back there for fun,” Hound pointed out. “I did it because it was you.”

“Uh,” Iruka said.

“Also, I think the Godaime would be slightly more inclined to help me if you, you know, vouched that I wasn’t an assassin or some other unsavory character.”

“You’re not that unsavory,” Iruka allowed generously. Hound’s cheek pinked a little.

“Thank you,” he said.

\+ + +

They crossed the border into the Land of Frost by midday, stopping mostly so Iruka could throw up in an abandoned, gone-to-seed shed while Hound’s fingers carefully held his hair back, rubbed circles against the base of his spine.

“Sorry,” he gasped after the headache slid back down his jaw.  He squeezed out enough chakra to flood his cheeks and hands with warmth, then turned around. “Thanks.”

Hound looked in the opposite direction. “Mm? I just wanted some time to read my book.”

The light spun and glinted with snow behind him, casting a dusky blue glow over everything in the shed, and beneath Hound’s aggressively casual pose Iruka could see the curve of a question. Kakashi used to read the whole of Iruka’s day in a single glance; “It’s because I haven’t been able to see you as often lately,” he’d admitted, still glowing from his promotion to ANBU and only pretending to be secretive about it, as if anyone in the mission room didn’t know why Kakashi’s public assignments had gone down 86 percent in the past 3 months. Later, he’d gotten contemplatively drunk at Konoha’s second most popular bar and won a thumb wrestling match against Guy, and afterward, walked Iruka back to the chuunin barracks before leaving him with a kiss on both eyelids, sighing, “I can keep you safe now, you know.”

“We’re not together anymore,” Iruka told Hound. He thought, if their positions were reversed, he would want to know.

Sandaime used to say that Iruka was too headstrong and troublesome by half - always with a rueful smile on his face and a smack on the wrist -  and Iruka abruptly wished he was here now to yell it again, wipe the soot from Iruka’s nose and make him drink endless cups of searing hot tea. Sandaime had never known what to make of Kakashi, the two of them circling around each other warily like cats, but he’d asked no questions when Iruka had announced two years ago that Kakashi wouldn’t be coming by anymore, only wrapped him tight in a hug that smelled like clean cloth and ink. 

Hound blinked. “Why not?”

Iruka resisted the urge to pull the guy’s hair. “What do you mean, why not?”

Hound’s eye narrowed pensively. “Was it too hard?” he asked, voice a little quieter. “Was I?”

Iruka thought about Kakashi climbing out of bed earlier and earlier, how at first it had just been waking up alone two or three or six times a week, an odd bruise on the ribs that Kakashi wouldn’t explain during sex. Things had been busy, they were both busy, and Kakashi was still - thoughtful, picking up the leaves for Iruka’s favorite tea without being asked and kissing him fiercely outside Ichiraku before leaving: to Suna, to Whirlpool, to places Iruka had never even heard of. It had been months before they really fought, a winding, ugly argument that started at Kakashi brushing off all the time he spent training that new recruit Tenzo and lasted through dinner, breakfast, the next year. 

“It was always going to be hard,” Iruka said finally, because there wasn’t a ninja in the village who didn’t know about the Hatakes’ ostracization before the Third War, the sense of grim duty that settled over Kakashi like a chill before missions. “I think he just thought it wasn’t worth it anymore.”

The sucker-punched look on Hound’s face would almost be hilarious if Iruka’s chest didn’t feel sore with aching familiarity at this, the months spent wondering who the real Kakashi was, when he wasn’t making Sakumo-sama proud and competing with Guy and kissing Iruka too hard in the alley behind Ichiraku. “Did you try asking him?” Hound pressed, and there was something too intense in his words, possessive and angry and hopeful. 

“I didn’t need to,” Iruka sighed.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author Note:** So I realized belatedly that I really should have googled “Hawk and Wolf” before writing 3000+ words about something completely different going off just the artwork itself...tl;dr, this is an AU where Sakumo never commits suicide, fights in the Third Shinobi World War, and becomes Hokage after Minato’s death, while Iruka is adopted by the Sarutobi clan. And then some universe-crossing happens. I am so sorry.
> 
> Also, working a full-time research job while trying to study for standardized tests is a bitch, so this is Part 1/2
> 
>  
> 
> **Mod Note:** Prompt 18  
>  Art Prompt: [Hawk and Wolf](http://kakairu-fest.livejournal.com/103728.html) by [pentapus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/pseuds/pentapus)


End file.
